It’s Beltane Eve, Walpurgisnacht, the twin holiday of Samhain. It’s just as well I have no plans to be dancing around a bonfire tonight, because it’s already 30 degrees out and there’s a possibility of frost. I won’t be able to get up at dawn and wash my face in the dew, it will be frozen!
Signs of spring at my house:
- Giles is covered with mats (he’s the only one of the four who gets lots of them).
- the house is covered with dust balls and tracked in dirt because I haven’t gotten around to vacuuming–I’ve been spending too much time out in the yard.
- I am covered with poison ivy. *heavy sigh* The nature spirits make me pay for all the cutting and digging and weeding I do! This isn’t as severe a case as I’ve had in the past–it’s mostly just hives. But itchy, gods…and when it doesn’t itch, it hurts. So I’m uncomfortable and not sleeping well, and I’m exhausted and a bit woozy because my immune system is all out of whack from the reaction. It hasn’t peaked out yet, it’s still coming out in new places. I’m not sure exactly where I ran into it, but I obviously wasn’t careful enough.
I’ve been keeping track of the yard work, and I added it all up yesterday. In three weeks, I’ve put in 28 hours out in the yard! I had a couple of days off because we’ve been deluged with rain for two straight days. Now it’s just cold.
I’ve spent chunks of time on two days this week upgrading the hardware on this computer. Quite a while ago, one of the cats made a dash across the computer keyboard and pulled two of the keycaps off. I managed to get them snapped back into place, but they were never quite as snug as originally. Recently, one of those caps came off again–I think I snagged it with a fingernail or something, but it wouldn’t have been so vulnerable if it hadn’t been pulled off before. This time, I couldn’t get the teeny little bits of the key mechanism back together, and it appeared that an infinitesimal little post had broken on one piece.
This was the semicolon/colon key, which I don’t use constantly but use often enough. I finally went to Dell’s website to see if there were more detailed directions on replacing the key cap, maybe in the user forums, where I have found the damnedest information you can imagine. The forums advised replacing the keyboard. I couldn’t find a way of doing that online, so I finally called Dell. They had a keyboard–for $12.95! But then, the sales rep said, “We have this special offer right now–you can upgrade your computer’s memory, double it, for $69 instead of $99–and get free one-day shipping for everything.”
Well…wow. That was too good a deal to pass up. I need more memory on this thing. I’ve maxed it out. If I’ve got InDesign, and Paint Shop Pro, and other things, all running at once, I’ve sent this computer to its knees. I’ve had to close apps down to free the memory. Plus, I’m editing audio and video now. So I said okay.
The keyboard arrived on Monday. It actually was very easy to replace. This is a good thing, because I had to take it out and put it back twice before I got everything in straight (my errors, although the directions could have been more clear). It’s funny…the very first time I cracked the case, I was quivering with apprehension, worried that I was going to break something…the third time, I was just ripping into the thing. *wry smile* Trouble is, it isn’t the actual hardware replacement that is time consuming. The time consuming part was that I decided to do a full backup of my data first. The memory stick I’m using for backups had gotten a bit jumbled, so I decided to dump all its contents onto the hard drive of the old Dell, wipe the memory stick, and make a fresh backup, of everything. That took a little time. Plus, the old Dell, because it doesn’t get booted up very often, and when it does, it automatically connects to the wireless network, chugged away downloading updates and running a full NAV scan on itself. It was several hours before I even started installing the keyboard.
It’s very pleasant to have a new keyboard. Yesterday the memory modules arrived. I installed them today. But the directions suggested updating the BIOS first. I went to Dell’s website, found an update to the BIOS, which was marked “Recommended,” and downloaded it. But before I flash the BIOS, of course I have to update the backup, so I did that. Then, because the directions for installing the memory modules were even more murky than for replacing the keyboard, I opened all three of the covers on the bottom of the case before I found the one for the frellin’ memory modules. But now my computer has 2 GB of memory, which is its maximum capacity.
It’s just all very time-consuming, which is why all the tinkering and rebuilding I enjoy doing with computers has gotten put on the back burner these days.
On Tuesday evening, I went on a “Ghost-hunting and Vampire Tour” in Salem. But I’m going to put that in another post.
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